Why Is It So Difficult To Chug A Gallon of Milk?

It's one of the strangest - and potentially grossest - challenges out there. But what happens when you drink milk? Why does it make you throw up?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
it's Christian Seger. Have you ever heard of this gallon
of milk challenge before? Here's the idea. You try to
drink a gallon of milk and hold it down for
an hour without puking. That sounds unnecessary to me, but

(00:24):
I mean it's called the challenge, and you don't win anything,
I think, but still, thousands of people have tried it
and failed. So if you've already heard of this, then
you've probably heard it's impossible. But spoiler alert, it's not.
It's just really hard and really gross. So what makes
drinking milk difficult? Well, let's begin with the basics. Drinking

(00:47):
a gallon of anything in an hour can be hazardous.
Even a gallon of water can be fatal if you
drink it too quickly. Too much water overloads the circulatory
system and the kidneys, elutes blood electrolytes, and can cause
cells to swell, potentially causing brain damage or death. So

(01:08):
it's not surprising that a gallon of milk is also
bad business stomach wise, most people who attempt it vomit.
There are a few proposed causes for this condition. You'll
often hear people blame lactose for the pucatude let's call
it of milk. Lactose is essentially milk sugar, and your

(01:28):
body can only process so much of it at a time.
You need the enzyme called lactasee to deal with lactose,
and the idea here is that people who are lactose
intolerant can't process any lactose and they may throw up
from just one glass of milk. But nutritionists like Dr

(01:48):
Sarah Ash at North Carolina State University point out that
lactose intolerance is a problem of the large intestine, not
the stomach. Since pctose is digested and absorbed in the
small intestine, the trouble doesn't really hit until it passes
to the large intestine, where it's consumed by bacteria, producing

(02:10):
diarrhea and gas fun both unpleasant in their own ways,
but nothing that could stop you from holding the milk down.
Then there's calcium. Milk contains a lot of calcium, about
three hundred milligrams per eight ounce glass. A Tom's chewable
tablet contains about two hundred milligrams of available calcium, so

(02:33):
drinking a gallon of milk is like downing twenty five
Tom's tablets, it messes up the acid balance in the stomach,
giving your stomach another reason to consider puking. The most
likely culprit, however, is surprisingly simple. It's just stomach size, guys.
The average stomach can hold about a half a gallon

(02:55):
of well whatever. More than that, you run the risk
of triggering these stretch receptors in your stomach, which can
induce vomiting. There are a few people with the ability
to complete this challenge, like professional competitive eaters, but for
most of us, this is a pipe dream that could
quickly turn messy. So while chugging a gallon of milk

(03:16):
may be more difficult than chugging water, it turns out
that drinking a gallon of anything this quickly just isn't
a great idea. Check out the brainstuff channel on YouTube,
and for more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com.